Blogging And Popularity

I had a very interesting debate with a close friend of mine regarding blogging and getting more hits. He insisted that my way of blogging was not the right way to go if I wanted to make money from it and increase my hits.

He himself is a blogger and runs a very successful blog and has created 3 very popular websites in total.

As I’ve been away from blogging for a few weeks working on another project I decided to think long and hard about the way I wanted to go with the blogging. I admit that I still think of blogging as generating a source of income but I don’t necessarily think this blog is going to do that. I still want this blog to be putting down the insights that I get and also have it a marketing tool for all the things I do and services I provide.

Blog Post Lists

I have seen many blog posts recently and many are just simple lists like: 8 Ways To Be Happier; 15 Ways To Overcome Tiredness; etc, etc. Some are very popular. Others not so much. Some are very imaginative and some are quite stale. I’ve done a few of those myself but it’s not something I want to do all the time. I’m not going to follow the trend just to get a few extra hits. I want my posts to be genuine and meaningful.

Content and Value

Sometimes I feel like just blogging a couple of lines. Sometimes I feel like blogging a few thousand words. I don’t necessarily think one has more value for the reader than the other but I do want all my posts to be for a reason. There’s going to be the odd occasion I’m going to post about a few updates; what I’ve been up to and sometimes just to post up random musings! Overall I think I can convey my thoughts in under a thousand words but there will be times where that will be insufficient like with my post about Dealing With Death which was more like 3000.

Topics

Personal development blogging is quite challenging compared to something like political blogging. It’s not as if you have a fresh stream of topics in the media to discuss. From there you can pick any number of topics and voice your opinion about them whereas this kind of blog is very personal and good topics are more rare. I’ve personally never felt a shortage of topics to blog about even though this is now around my 450th post. I even already know what my two next topics are about and I’ve already begun writing one of them. If you’ve got to a point where you’ve run out of things to discuss on your blog then my advice to you would be to spend some time alone; get in the right place within yourself – that place of inspiration and you’ll never run out of ideas. That place is an unlimited stream!

Income

I will definitely try and generate some form of income through this blog. It’s more likely to be from book sales than advertising. That’s a long way away and in the mean time I can work on the design to make it more pleasing to the eye. It will definitely ‘a’ source of income rather than my main source of income.

Reaching People

If I can use this space to reach a wide audience and in some way help them with the words I put down then great! I’ve done my job regardless of the actual number of hits I get. Yes I would love to get more traffic but I don’t want artificial traffic that is just superficial. I want you to return because you genuinely feel that my writing and ideas are beneficial to you or you find my humorous posts entertaining! Either way I’m quite clear about what I’m doing here and what I want to achieve through this blog.

Final Thoughts

The great thing about my blog is that I know I have helped many people with the 100’s of articles that I’ve written. It may not be the whole world but I’ve reached far and wide. I’ve used my imagination as well as drawn on experience to create some valuable posts in my opinion. I may not have the most popular blog out there but I feel like I’ve made a good contribution to the content on the internet. I intend for not to continue on the same route, improve my writing, continue being inspired and write as often as I can.

Here’s to the next 450 posts!